Burning is the process of intentionally destroying a cryptocurrency to decrease its supply. This is usually achieved by sending the coins to a burn address - an address to which no one has access or the private keys. Burn addresses usually have a large number of repeated characters and don't look like standard addresses.
For instance, the burn address for Bitcoin often starts with "1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE", which is a valid address but it's nearly impossible that anyone owns the private key to it.
Burning is often used as a strategy by cryptocurrency projects to manage the supply of their tokens and stabilize or increase the price. By reducing the supply, the value of the remaining tokens may increase if the demand stays the same or increases.
Binance Coin (BNB) is a notable example of a cryptocurrency that regularly burns a portion of its supply. Binance commits to using 20% of its profits each quarter to buy back and burn BNB until 50% of the total supply has been burned.
Coins and tokens can also be unintentionally burned if they are used in an invalid transaction, or if the destination address is malformed. Additionally, if access to some coins is lost due to reasons like losing the passphrase or the death of the owner, then those coins are effectively burned as well.
A famous case of unintentional burning is the loss of 7,500 Bitcoins by a man who accidentally threw away his hard drive containing the private keys to his Bitcoin wallet. Those Bitcoins are now permanently inaccessible and are considered to be burned.
* All terms and definitions may update as the Cryptionary improves.
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